Strength

Strength Training

Being Strong can help your riding in so many ways, endurance of the muscles, max strength of the muscles, as well as power. Strength also plays a crucial role in preventing injury during sport, not only as it will help stabilise your joints meaning less tweaked ankles, knees or shoulders but it can help stop the silly mistakes we all tend to do when tired or learning a new trick.

At Wild Training we like to train our clients to be stronger than they look, rather than looking stronger than they are!

Most people will only ever use up to 50% of their muscles fibres during muscular contraction. This in turn means they are missing out on a potential extra 50% of strength and power.

A great way to build strength is to train your nervous system to use more of the muscles you already have. (Beyond that the eventual limiting factor of the muscles strength will be size. Given that we are training for snowboarding in this particular case size of the muscle is not that important). It is also important to remember that certain strength training can limit joint flexibility when sticking with the same movement patterns. Choosing exercises that include full range of movement through the joints and eccentric work will keep the flexibility that is needed.

Snowboarders need absolute control and power from their muscles, they don’t need to bench press a house!

When riding up to a rail or a kicker you want to have the confidence that your body is recruiting everything that each muscle has to give, allowing you to have that absolute control and power. Control means less injury, going bigger and stomping everything you try!

Here are some basic rules

– 3-5 reps

– 2-6 sets

– 1-4 minutes rest between sets (4 minutes rest would be used for the most intense sets)

– Tempo 4:0:1

– Train each muscle group up to twice per week

A great tool for building this kind of strength is the Kettlebell.

The main principles are:

– Whole body Training

– Cardio/Resistance

– Posterior Chain Activation

– Ballistic Strength

A lot of kettle bell exercises are based on whole body movement, rather than muscle actions. Take a simple kettle bell swing as an example. To create the vertical swing you have to create force through your hips using your calves, hamstrings, quads and glutes. You need to keep your back straight by engaging your core so abdominals and extensors are working. You also need to stabilise your shoulders so trapezius and rhomboids are working as well as many other muscles. That’s a lot of muscle working in what is probably one of the most simple kettle bell exercise you can do.

Using the basic Kettlebell swings and lifts, will give you a great all over stength

Training session:

Strength endurance = 60 seconds sets – 30 seconds rest between sets

Max strength = 30 second sets – 30 seconds rest between sets

Just follow this link to our Wild Training You Tube Channel to see some great exercise ideas:

As always start with a reasonable weight and build up to heavier, once you have learnt the swings and lifts in a safe and controlled manner.